


Jack Rollins Does Aftercare

by Kara_McKay



Series: Belonging With; Belonging To [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: BDSM, BDSM as Practiced by Well-Meaning Idiots, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Blood, Consensual Violence, Domspace, Figuring It Out as They Go, HYDRA Husbands, I'm Bad At Tagging, Idiots in Love, Kinda Cute if You Squint, Light Masochism, Light Sadism, M/M, Misuse of Kitchen Implements, Not Bloodplay, Recovering Smart Ass Masochist, Subspace, Superficial Injuries, Top Jack, Unsafe Sex, poor communication skills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 22:44:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15982064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kara_McKay/pseuds/Kara_McKay
Summary: Having devoured all of the Top Jack Rollins fic that can be even loosely described as BDSM, I found myself curious about Jack's approach to aftercare.  You'll find some in this fic, but in all honesty, it's not really what the story is about.  Herein is a version of Jack and Brock finding their way at the beginning of a kink relationship begun at Brock's instigation, and with only a few Google searches to set them on their questionable way.  It's consensual and lightweight, though arguably neither safe nor sane, and has a happy ending.





	Jack Rollins Does Aftercare

**Author's Note:**

> In my preferred form of toxicity, the pain source is also the comfort source. It’s been roughly twelve years since I’ve written fanfic or portrayed that particular type of mind fuckery with its accompanying slippery consent issues, and none of that rolled out this time. This is also the first time I've told the story from the top’s perspective, and with a bottom who isn't vulnerable. This story actually describes something more akin to a Top/bottom BDSM relationship than to abuse and co-dependence, though it can definitely still be described as BDSM practiced by idiots with hardware rather than BDSM as practiced by the sort of people who are likely to read educational material and attend a workshop. 
> 
> Thanks to all the authors who’ve given us hot power top Jack Rollins. I’m not sure what I could add to what they’ve already written, so I’m choosing to begin where they end.

The bed in the corner bothered him; it worried at the back of his mind in a way the table with its straps and buckles did not. The table was straightforward. He’d made it himself after an evening spent browsing page after page of bondage furniture, and while it wasn’t as versatile as some of the equipment he’d seen, it was a good, solid piece that exuded quiet malice. Only bad things happened on this table and, for that matter, occasionally on the X-shaped cross under the stairs, and more often in the heavy, wooden chair with the cutout in its seat and similar restraint options. Those items could not be mistaken for anything other than what they were. The bed, queen-sized with pale green, cotton sheets and blue coverlet over its plastic mattress cover, was something else entirely. It said its own thing that changed the shape of everything else in the room. 

And it wasn’t just the bed. It was the shower stall with its hot and cold running water, and the rug, and the mini fridge, and the bedside table. It was this entire cozy nook he’d made because he’d wanted to push Brock, but he hadn’t wanted that mess on his couch, and Brock couldn’t always shower in the bathroom down the hall, and if they were going to use the basement, Jack wasn’t going to carry Brock up the damned stairs. Jack could analyze problems as they arose and solve them, but he and Brock had no pattern from which to deviate, so his solutions weren’t course corrections. They were additions and subtractions – structural and personal adjustments of a sort he’d never associated with people he fucked. 

Of course, he’d also never put someone he was fucking in restraints, or hit them, or done anything else that could end with him sitting in the back seat of a cop car if his partner woke up and decided they hadn’t liked it after all. He sure as shit hadn’t ever entertained the thought of having a mini dungeon between the furnace and washer/drier combo. That fact still blindsided him from time to time—that he had what the casual observer could only describe as a torture chamber in his soundproofed basement, and that if he and Brock were to die together in the line of duty, his twin sister Jane would probably be the first person to get a look at it. He thought she’d have enough sense to know what she was seeing, but if she brought the wrong person with her, it would still be at least a nine days’ wonder at the Trisk, and all because Jack had found out that he really, really liked the sounds Brock made when he took a belt to the insides of his thighs. 

And things like that don’t come out of nowhere, do they? And setups like the one in his basement aren’t built all of a sudden over a lust-blind weekend spent running back and forth between Home Depot and a set of downloaded plans taped over a workbench. Brock hadn’t exactly come along with a bag of strange kinks and said, “Hey, buddy, online dating’s a bitch, so could you do me a favor? Maybe knock some stuff together?” He hadn’t sidled up to Jack and batted his eyes or twisted his arm. It had just been a… a thing. A no frills kind of thing that sometimes got rough. Jack could let his mean streak out, and sometimes it felt a little bit wrong, but Brock wasn’t going to wake up and decide he hadn’t liked it. He instigated it, most of the time, and he was the kind of guy with whom one thing could just lead to the next thing over time, and never look like much more than sex. 

They’d been drunk when Brock had suggested what he’d really like to try. Retrospectively, Jack thought the alcohol had been planned—that Brock, whose sense of professional responsibility and fearlessness in combat were irreproachable, hadn’t been able to say what he needed to say without several shots of tequila in him. Jack didn’t think he’d needed to be drunk to assent, but who knew? He was pretty sure that Brock’s short, drunken speech could have been summarized as a request to actively fetishize Jack’s height, scars, and penchant for menacing silence, and he supposed there was a good chance he’d have walked away from that if he’d been sober. Maybe he’d have felt embarrassed, vulnerable, or even hurt, and if he’d felt any of those things, he’d have covered it over with anger, so yeah, on second thought, the tequila had helped Jack, too. 

One thing had led to the next thing, which was no longer quite sex, or not only sex, and he’d realized he liked Brock’s suggestion in its general outline if not in its specifics. He was not interested in being a leather clad bogeyman supervising abject performances of exhibitionist sexuality. He was very much interested in aggressive interaction, encroachment, and possession. Maybe Brock thrilled to Jack’s imagined voice calling him a slut, but Jack’s developing fantasy had to do with the steady erasure of boundaries; it necessitated pulling Brock outside of his porn movie, I’ll do anything headspace. It required that Brock actually do anything Jack wanted him to do instead of doing what he wanted Jack to want him to do. That was the way this was supposed to go, dammit. Jack was supposed to be dominating. That’s what Brock had said. And then the Spatula Incident had happened. 

The Spatula Incident took place on a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon in the living room when they’d still been more bluster and bravado than top and bottom, and Jack had damned well known better. He supposed that he could probably kill someone with a pair of pasta tongs if it came down to it, but grabbing the red nylon pancake turner from the utensil holder next to the stove had seemed like a good idea, and Brock, naked and sneeringly confident, had said, “So what are you going to do with that?”

He’d backed Brock into the living room, not hurrying or evincing anything but cold certainty, and had there been a flicker in Brock’s eyes? Had Jack seen a flash of self-preservation briefly surfacing and just as quickly suppressed? Probably not, Jack thought. Not in Brock Rumlow, who was too proud of his rock-hard physique to properly register humiliation three quarters of the time, and who was deeply—probably neurotically—invested in being able to keep up with men half his age. Invested in staying a kid, really, with his gelled, cockatiel hair and handsome face with its deceptively open smile. Whatever Jack had seen, he doubted it had been fear, even when he’d ordered Brock on his knees on the green carpet in front of the couch. Fear took time to properly cultivate, especially if one were picky about its time, place, and composition. They hadn’t learned that lesson yet, though, and finding out what Jack could do with a spatula hadn’t been the thing to teach it. 

They had, at least, gotten past the point of “Make me!” and “Prove it!” Brock had knelt without argument, his knees wide, shoulders back, hands pressed to the couch cushions, and flexed glutes presented as an outthrust target. It had been a self-consciously pretty, S-curve pose that spoke of cooperation more than submission, and Jack had felt vicious excitement at the prospect of ruining it. He’d had nothing but that red spatula about which Brock had derisively wondered, and he was going to be working at a lousy angle for a tall man because he hadn’t considered logistics when he’d put Brock on his knees, but he’d made it happen. 

Light and sturdy, with its rubberized handle snug in Jack’s hand, the spatula had flown effortlessly, cutting or pushing the air as Jack switched edge for flat and back again, bending at the knees to save his back as he swung. Brock had sucked in a surprised breath on the first blow, swallowing a laugh that Jack had come to identify as startled, excited disbelief—the sound a person might make as their roller coaster car begins its irreversible, downward tilt. Brock had held his pretty pose at first, but then he’d been moving to stabilize himself. Jack had steadily picked up the pace, watching Brock struggle to stay still once he’d quit being able to rock back into the blows, and then to reposition himself unprompted when he’d quit being able to keep from recoiling after each, and then finally to just hold on. It had somehow felt like fucking and flying rolled into one, and though it couldn’t possibly have gone on for very long, to Jack it felt like it was happening in a bubble of expanding rather than passing time. Somewhere in that expansion, he’d ended up on his knees behind Brock with his trousers open, too far gone to take them off entirely, and then the bubble had popped. 

With the delirious rush of what he could do – of what Brock would let him do – passed, Jack had found himself edging as close to panic as he’d ever gotten in his adult life. Confronted with the crazed network of blood stippled welts and short, purple cuts covering Brock’s reddened skin from the upper swell of his ass to the backs of his knees, Jack had felt like he was the one in the roller coaster car, inexorably moving to the top of the highest, steepest slope. How had he not noticed the amount of damage he’d been doing? He’d have been better off using his belt. 

“Okay, babe?” He’d asked, settling one large, calloused hand on the small of Brock’s back, and Brock hadn’t snarled at him not to call him that. He’d hummed contently, murmuring unintelligible acquiescence. His face, sheened with sweat, had been smooth, and his posture had loosened into a limp curve conformed to the couch cushions. Jack, frowning in a moment of rare indecision, had patted him on the back. “I knew you could take it,” he’d bluffed. “Lemme get you some water.” 

And that was how that had rolled. Brock might’ve been buzzing on adrenaline and endorphins, and whatever other chemical shit the body produces when someone beats hell out of it with a fucking spatula, but Jack had abruptly found himself in the right here and right now – clear headed in a way that he associated with fighting, not fucking. They were dehydrated. They stank. Brock was only superficially injured, but he needed basic first aid, and Jack could only hope that he’d be able to sit without wincing by the next Monday morning. The aftermath of Jack’s arousal had evaporated without leaving so much as a residual hum. 

Arousal had ceased to be relevant, however, and Jack had moved with that outward equanimity and systematizing forward motion Brock would have recognized from more professional circumstances if he’d been noticing much of anything at that moment. As it was, he’d leaned heavily into Jack’s supporting bulk, still on his knees while Jack, too dismayed for frustration, held a plastic cup of cold water to his lips. The dove gray couch had turned slate gray with sweat where Brock had leant over its center cushion, and now Jack could see that, at some point during the beating, Brock had come: there was a viscous smear on the corded fabric. Ordinarily, he’d have had something to say about that, but the couch looked to be at the end of its usefulness, and Jack had had more on his mind than teaching Brock a quick lesson about when to use, “Please” and “Thank you.” 

There was a similar, equally worrying smear, now more pink than white, adding to the slickness of sweat and blood on the puffy flesh of Brock’s left ass cheek. That was okay in one sense—they were both clean—but it worried Jack in a way that did not bear close examination. That worry would occasionally reappear as a vague, amorphous discomfort in days to come, but in the stark, bright, present of that moment, he’d buried it with the utter completeness that comes with years of necessity driven compartmentalization. 

So there had been water and more bodily fluids on his couch; all he’d needed was for someone to piss or puke to round out the saliva, semen, and blood. He’d gotten them through a hot shower and then found Neosporin for Brock, who’d gotten his shit together around the time Jack had been shampooing his hair for him and had begun bitching that he didn’t have a fucking diaper fetish when he’d seen the ointment tube in Jack’s hand. Jack had gotten back into the groove enough to give him a hard swat on the hip, not so incidentally missing the mess he’d made of Brock’s ass. They’d wound up in Jack’s king-sized bed, Brock on his stomach and Jack propped up against the pillows, for the first and last time sharing a pizza atop the vibrantly colored crazy quilt Jack’s mother had made for him. 

That had been the last time anything untoward had happened between them, and the first time they’d talked about what they were doing together. It hadn’t been the last time he’d hurt Brock—not by a long shot—nor even the last time he’d made him bleed, but it had been the last time he’d let the moment move him. Jack hadn’t apologized, but he’d made it clear that complete spontaneity was not going to be part of their future repertoire. In their line of work, shit had a way of happening, and Jack figured it was more likely to happen to someone trying to get the job done with welts and bruises on his ass, back, or thighs. He didn’t even want to touch on the thought of the professional suicide the same injuries could constitute in less catastrophic infirmary circumstances. None of those fears were the kind of concerns he wanted to sow in Brock’s mind. If Jack felt like letting him, Brock could float in that euphoric mental space where everything was possible, but Jack absolutely could not go there. The potential price was too high. 

That was how they’d gotten here from there, into their odd, little niche bedroom with its soft blankets and crisp, white cased pillows, and here was Brock, stretched out under the one and head tilted back into the other, too thoroughly used, dreamily exhausted, and deliciously conscious of his own physical being for his vanity to intrude upon his comfort. Here he was only himself, somehow less aware than he was in sleep, turned inward to chase the last echoes of sensation. Brock wasn’t over the rainbow—Jack wasn’t into playing with warm meat, even if it did have phenomenal bone structure and abs from which you could bounce a quarter—but for a little while, Jack wasn’t really on Brock’s radar. For a little while, that was okay with Jack. 

The tip of Brock’s tongue tapped at his upper lip. He sighed, reaching for the water bottle on the table, and Jack, who’d taken a few minutes to clean up and put on a pair of blue sweats, handed it to him before sitting down beside him. 

“Chocolate?” he asked, not waiting for an answer as he unwrapped the Hershey’s bar he’d grabbed from the fridge. “And I don’t want to hear about fuckin’ calories.” 

“Mmm,” Brock replied. He started to reach for the half-unwrapped bar. Jack’s gaze turned flat, and the sound that escaped Brock’s lips was almost a giggle. “Bastard,” he said, without any heat, and Jack broke off a square of chocolate. He held it to Brock’s lips. Brock’s sharp, white teeth indented the chocolate before his lips closed around it, taking it from Jack’s hand as easily and unselfconsciously as a pet taking a treat from its master. His tongue flickered out to lap a smear of melted chocolate from Jack’s thumb – quick and functional more than sexual. Jack smiled. 

“You’re good.” He said, watching Brock’s jaw flex. “No one’s ever been this good for me. Not like you.” It was a sentiment Jack sometimes expressed under different, more structured circumstances, and in an entirely different tone. On those occasions, Brock’s eyes would stutter away from Jack’s face even while his cock swelled and twitched in hopeful but far from certain anticipation. Brock smiled this time, the pride in his warm, hazel eyes so obvious that Jack wanted to look away. He wasn’t embarrassed on Brock’s behalf or ashamed, nor did he feel any temporary fits of conscience. It was just a feeling, unnamed and unsettling in the same way as that first undeniable evidence of sexual reciprocity had been unsettling. It had to do with this latest addition that had happened without any conscious decision making on his part, and the adjustments he was making for it. 

Jack didn’t know what to do with that feeling, so he broke off another piece of chocolate. Brock took it, and Jack nodded. “Yeah, you’re good.” He ran his index finger tip along the high curve of Brock’s cheekbone. “Pretty and perfect.” He could go on like that, rambling repetitiously, cadence mattering more than content. Brock would eat it up for a little while in the same, self-indulgent way he ate the chocolate, and Jack had gotten damned good at reading Brock’s post-play emotional gear shifts. He could go on, wrapping it up with a kiss on the forehead just before Brock’s satisfied smile could turn into an amused smirk, but instead he asked, “We got something, don’t we, babe?”

“We do.” Brock replied, chewing obliviously. “I think that’s a very fair observation.” 

“Smartass,” Jack said. He supposed it had been a little unfair to spring that question on Brock when he wasn’t equipped to realize a question was being sprung, but Jack’s courage had its limits, too. “Just you and me, huh?”

“Mmhm.” Brock frowned. “Better be. Not like that shit can go through the dishwasher.” He waved a hand in the general direction of Jack’s DIY wonderland, and Jack’s brow furrowed. He paused, looking for the words he needed to clarify himself while Brock pushed himself up against the pillows, blanket pooling in his lap. His chest and stomach were smooth. Jack had made that one and only decision about Brock’s body earlier that year, and Brock had kept to it as if it were a stone engraved commandment. Jack supposed it was one, now, even if that amounted to the tail wagging the dog. He’d enforce it, anyway. 

“Stay another night,” Jack said abruptly. 

“Are you getting romantic on me?” Brock asked. “Is this you bein’ romantic, Jackie?” His voice was low and soft, and now that Brock was looking directly at him, Jack could see how sharp those hazel eyes were—definitely not over the rainbow, and not even a hint of half-dozing languor. Now Jack could see that he’d known exactly what Jack had been saying when he’d asked about exclusivity, and that it hadn’t had anything to do with sanitary issues. This could go any which way, Jack knew; Brock could be waiting for just the right moment to laugh, or roll his eyes, or get angry, or go along. 

“Yeah,” Jack said, simple and to the point, and Brock blinked. He stared for a moment, his face blank, and then his face split in a wide, unstudied grin. 

“Yeah, okay, I could stay another night, then,” Brock said, “if we’re gonna be romantic,” and in that light, giddy moment, Jack felt a new alteration to the shape of things beginning. Now, he thought, leaning in for a brief kiss, things were finally starting to make a little sense.


End file.
